Seems good on paper, though knowing the Greek overlord, he’ll be gone by December as whomever we sign this summer fails to have us in the top 6 by October 31st….
Reading U21 v Forest B is at Select Car Leasing Stadium (Madejski) tomorrow at 2pm.
Forest B are also in the Notts Senior Cup final against Basford on Tuesday evening, to be played at Eastwood CFC.
Playing in a souless bowl, home to a club dying because it's been moved outside of it's city. Will be nice for future Forest players to get a view of the future of the club.
Because of course Reading was a thriving powerhouse of a club during their time at Elm Park, before Madejski put his money in? The "because" in your statement is doing a fuck-ton of heavy lifting. In the 102 years at Elm Park (1896-1998) the sum total of their achievements was winning the 3rd Division / Division 3 (South) 3 times (25-26, 85-86 & 93-94), and winning the 4th Division once (78-79). Oh, and the Full Members Cup in 87-88.
I’m not, but I do think as a fanbase we need to get real about what we actually want. Building a sustainable, top-half team in the modern ‘Ship (which our fans have been saying they want for at least 25 years) requires a vast amount of dosh. El Greco could afford it, but the rules won’t let him - so we need to generate a lot of revenue. We can’t stay in the crumbling, archaic CG (which we all love) AND keep ticket prices low AND hang on to our best players (& you know that's what people will say when we sell Murillo / MGW) AND build a successful club. So which do we want?
Plan A is definitely redevelop the CG, and I imagine that’s why the club have spent c.5 years and millions of quid in working towards that. But if the state of the Council’s finances makes that impossible, they have to at least think about other options.
Too many of our fans seem to think that we are uniquely immune to the financial realities of modern football, because we once found a carpet fitter in Long Eaton who turned into a good centre forward.